


Anything but tenderness

by breathedout



Category: Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery
Genre: Boston is an exotic and scandalous location essentially indistinguishable from the fires of Hell, Busybodies, F/F, Reading Aloud, bereavement, discomfited ministers, historical murders, holy hannah, laughter is not the only eroticism, maybe in another like three years they'll work up to spooning, negotiation, negotiation of boundaries, no talking about feelings!, prickly Presbyterians, seriously this is the most conceptually difficult fictional kiss I've ever worked for, slow smolder, there is also collaborating on the housework, they hate joy but I love them anyway, without any actual, you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-29
Updated: 2016-10-29
Packaged: 2018-08-21 20:05:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8259010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: Idle hands do the devil's work, it was often said, and so was it any wonder that Rachel's mind had got stuck on the one thing? The pig, and Anne's letter. Anne's letter, and the pig.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [onedogtown](https://archiveofourown.org/users/onedogtown/gifts).



> Thanks, onedogtown, for giving me the opportunity to write this pairing! I had a blast & hope you enjoy the results. 
> 
> My major reservation about this story is only that I am about as far, ideologically, from a 19th-century Presbyterian as it is possible to be. So I apologize if there are any points where my own godlessness peeks through. 
> 
> Many thanks to **[kathryne](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kathryne/pseuds/kathryne)** for a quick Canadiana consult, and to **[greywash](http://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash)** , as always, for a quick and insightful beta job and a delightful conversation about Rachel Lynde. And also for the hugs and steadiness when I was sobbing because I hadn't had time to write anything for months. <3

She came out following on Marilla's footsteps—view blocked by Marilla's beanpole height; frame jostled back by Marilla's bony elbows that pointed out from her sides like they had for the past thirty years when she dried her hands on that patched old apron—so the first thing Rachel knew about it was just a noise like scuffling out on the back porch. Marilla was "Just a minute!"ing out loud and "I declare"ing under her breath and then "Why—Reverend," she said, in a nothing kind of a voice, stopped dead for a second before she moved to unbolt the back door. 

If she'd waited just a breath longer then Rachel, for one, could have told her there was something fishy. The Avonlea parish had come to a pretty pass, it was true, what with speechifying from the pulpit on texts not even Scripture, and talk of heathens dying uncondemned to the eternal fires, and now what with ministers arriving without a by-your-leave at the back door of all places, when a body was peeling the potatoes for supper. But not even in these degenerate times—as Rachel would have pointed out, had she been given the opportunity—did a minister of the Lord make quite the ruckus of scrabbling and snorting that was coming from that corner back behind the old cider press. It was a wonder Marilla didn't hear it, and no mistake. For all Rachel knew, Marilla was getting on toward deaf as well as the trouble she'd been having with her eyes. 

She still moved spry, though, you had to say that for her. Marilla Cuthbert'd always been a wiry one, especially when roused, and she moved quicker than Rachel could get the words out: opened the door to the round, bowlegged form of the new minister, who was mopping his damp moon of a face with a handkerchief so soiled no relation of Mrs. Rachel's would ever suffer themselves to be caught dead with it. Marilla'd said "Reverend," again; and "Miss Cuthbert," said the Reverend, "Mrs. Lynde." After that Marilla could hardly avoid moving to the side and standing against the door so that the Reverend could come right into the Green Gables back porch, with all its spiderwebs and broken old machine parts, and this when only the day before Marilla'd got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed the floor in the front entryway, and suffered Rachel to beat out the hooked rugs and hang them out to air in the sun in the side yard. But some people do beat all, and he _was_ a minister of the Lord, and so even Rachel couldn't very well argue with Marilla for inviting him in. But for all Marilla Cuthbert might get up on her high horse with Rachel, she didn't move too quick that time, did she, inviting him in among the rusted hoe-blades and the old warped yarn swifts and Lord knows what. Rachel took note of that, you can be sure. It was pride, that's what. Pride from start to finish with her: Marilla always had put herself above folks and she'd live to regret it—and that's how Rachel's thoughts were occupied when from behind the cider press came a noise like a branch cracking off a tree, and then a huge blur of _animal_ came barrelling straight at them, straight for the door and straight between the bow legs of Avonlea's new minister, who was lifted backwards and carried off down the sloping Green Gables lawn.

They stood there frozen, the two of them: Marilla's knuckles tight on Rachel's shoulder through her black crepe as the Reverend was carried pell-mell across the grass by Mr. Harrison's prize-winning pig. It might've been as much as three or four seconds before they lit out after it; and though they'd sure enough started off by the time the beast bucked him off down by the brook and raced off for parts unknown, those few seconds went hard with them with the minister when they got down to the brook and picked him up, black coat all covered in mud, and dusted him off as best they could. All his liberal-minded nonsense didn't count for much then. When the chips are down, that's when you get a glimpse of what a body's really made of. Rachel had always said as much, and she could well believe they were hearing talk now of _disgraceful_ and _such treatment_ , and little enough of the lackadaisical so-called respect for the unsaved masses they'd heard about three Sundays back. Rachel'd dirtied the hem of her dress, too, fishing him out of the muck; but no matter about that when he was the one been made to look undignified. He stormed off with his back like a yardstick, and Rachel looked after him. 

"Well!" she said. "There's no call to blame us for a pig's doings. And the parish's got Suzanne Wright to mangle his suit. It'll wash and he won't even have to do the work of it."

When she turned back, Marilla was looking off toward where the minister had disappeared, and her mouth was working. Like she was chewing on the inside of her cheek, almost. 

"After all," Marilla said, "it was _our_ cider press broken," and suddenly her whole face cracked open and she tipped her head back and laughed. Big, rocking belly laughs. Something in it shocked Rachel and then it was like it tugged at her; but by the time she knew it did she was laughing, too. 

"That pig," gasped Marilla. "I've never seen a living creature so bound and determined to make its escape."

"I reckon it thought the Devil was on its back," Rachel said, "rather than the Reverend," and Marilla choked a little, shocked, but then she laughed harder and Rachel felt—and laughed harder too. And then Marilla took a long, steadying breath, and wiped her eyes with her wrists, looking up at the crisp blue October sky.

"Oh, well," she said. "I reckon the poor thing will give Green Gables a wide berth from now on, whether Mr. Harrison fixes the struts on his pig pen or not."

Rachel harrumphed. "Could be certain _other_ parties will know their place better too, now they've seen what comes of showing up on a body's back doorstep with no warning at all," she said. "Can you imagine? Whatever he was thinking, I'm sure I don't know. Why, unless he came tracking through the fields it'd have been more work for him. And with the parlour looking so spic and span and all."

"Some people," said Marilla, "don't set much store by other people's privacy." 

Marilla turned and walked back up the hill without another word; and Rachel, knowing very well when she'd been put in her place, stayed down by the brook and watched her go.  
  
  


***

 

 _Lexington Man Pleads Guilty…_ , Rachel read, and closed her eyes. She opened them again on _… from His Employers: As Sergeant Smith of the fifth police was riding down…_ —but it was no use. Her mind would wander. 

The fire in the stove was down to embers. But with the door open there was light enough to read by for those who could still rely on their eyesight. Lord knew Rachel'd have lit into Anne for doing it. But at Rachel's time of life, she reckoned, a person's eyes would hold out or they wouldn't; and if Providence had declared that Rachel's would stay sharp as the day she was married, then it was sure enough His will that she should keep using them. Besides, it did get awful draughty up there in the old spare room. And when she couldn't get to sleep right off then it felt the cold was sinking down into her bones. Rachel had never used to have trouble getting to sleep of a night, when Thomas was alive. She remembered telling Mrs. Allan once that she didn't hold with insomnia. It showed a body hadn't done an honest day's work, that's what. If the Allans hadn't moved on from Avonlea, then Mrs. Allan would no doubt be twitting Rachel about it now. 

Rachel snapped her paper. 

_Sarah J. Robinson_ , she read, _who is now awaiting her trial, has taken steps to recover $2000, the sum for which William J. Robinson, her son and one of her alleged victims, was insured in the Supreme Colony, United Order of Pilgrim Fathers. Papers were filed…_

The States must be a dreadful place, and no mistake. Mothers turning on their own sons, just for the insurance money. It was unnatural. Went against the ties of blood and righteousness and everything decent. And that Boston: so big and bustling that nobody knew anybody. Not properly. A devil like that Sarah Robinson could never get away with what she'd done in Avonlea, that was certain. Why, folks would ask questions. Arsenic poisoning, it was meant to have been. Well! Pauline Harris down at the dry goods store would sure enough remember anybody buying more rat poison than they'd done previous, and she'd sure enough tell the woman's neighbours so they could watch out for vermin in their own kitchens. And speaking of this Sarah Robinson's neighbours: where had they been, Rachel wanted to know? A mother with a sick child in Avonlea, there'd be all manner of hot food and fresh-made remedies brought 'round; everyone had watched a serious illness take its course in a child at least once. Well! They'd compare notes, wouldn't they? They'd know something was off about this one; no way they wouldn't. Thomas had always said that nothing got by Rachel—and the fact nothing did meant his last years had been more comfortable by half, if she did say so herself. She could spot a fever coming on from a querulous mood, and an attack of catarrh from a face he'd make at breakfast. And she'd let people know it, too. So they didn't upset him when he was on edge, or bore him when he was tired. Rachel didn't hold with a place like this Boston, where folks didn't look out for each other. Didn't take a proper interest, that's what, and look where it got them. Sinfulness running unchecked in the streets. There were prideful enough people right here in Avonlea, of course— right here at Green Gables, if it came to that. But not like this Boston. Thank Providence they still helped each other, here. Held each other to some standard of propriety. 

That was it. That was all it was: a help. A body had no cause to take offence.

 _… the Court House at East Cambridge_ , Rachel read, _in which the plaintiff sets forth…_ , but the glow from the grate was so low now that it was difficult, even for her, to make anything out. Rachel sat back in the wooden kitchen chair; closed her eyes. Outside the wind was picking up. It'd be whistling around the spare-room window like a ghost, Rachel thought, and then wondered at herself for such a fancy. 

It was the lonesomeness that did it. A body started down some fool path and there was nothing to stop them from keeping going on it. Morbid wool-gathering, Rachel thought, and bad habits, and all sorts. And then, when something did arrive to turn a person onto a better path, she was too set in her ways to welcome it. _I've kept housekeeping at Green Gables for forty years, Rachel Lynde_ , Marilla had said, through clenched teeth, standing at the sink with a wooden spoon in her hand as Rachel had drawn herself up as tall as her five-foot-two would let her, _and if you reckon to waltz in and make out you know better than I do what's best for my home—_

Well! Rachel'd only offered a suggestion or two. Anybody with eyes in their head could see the Green Gables curtains were fading unevenly; and there was no denying the mattresses needed turning. And Rachel's apple tart _had_ won three years in a row at the Harvest Exhibition, while Marilla was the first to admit that hers tended to dry. Marilla'd shown Christian charity taking her in, there was no denying that; but ever since then in the kitchen things between them had felt—well. Rachel wasn't accustomed to being alone, that's all. And then, this afternoon, with the pig. Absurd animal. And she and Marilla both, chasing down the hill together after it. As if two old ladies in aprons and house shoes were going to be able to do a blessed thing about a rampaging swine with a four-second head start. The way the minister had huffed and puffed, looking daggers at the both of them. The way Marilla had tipped back her head, and laughed so hard she cried. 

Rachel leaned forward and fished her brick out of the stove with the fire tongs. Ridiculous to be still awake at this hour: getting on toward midnight. Her hips creaked when she stood. She wrapped the brick in a kitchen flannel, and lit her candle to climb the stairs.  
  
  
  


***

 

 

" _Phillippa has invited me to winter with the Gordons in Nova Scotia_ ," Rachel read out, as Marilla on the couch sat darning a sock, and the November rain beat down. " _But I simply couldn't bear to be apart from Green Gables and all of you, for any longer than I absolutely must. Phil is a dear thing, though, for all she pretends to such frivolity_." 

Rachel snorted, and looked over her glasses, where Marilla had let a faint, absent little smile onto her face. Rachel reckoned it'd been there since she'd read the bit about Anne still coming home for Christmas: she expected Marilla had scarcely heard a word besides. Still, she read on: " _Why, only last week she_ —this Phillipa, she means— _paid Pris's entrance to the college production of_ Lady Windermere's Fan _, which Mrs. Lynde will be glad to hear was put on as a fund-raiser for the Widows and Orphans_ —Well! That does show a glimmer of sense, if I do say so— _and she flatly refused to let Pris pay her back. Of course, Phil said later it was because she couldn't bear to face Charlie Sloane's goggle-eyes all on her own, and she knew he'd be nearby if she was going in with me and Gil. But we all knew that was nonsense. Phil could walk into any room in Redmond and have most of the boys fetching and carrying for her inside a quarter hour. Why, not a fortnight ago, Pris and I had to smuggle her out the back door of our boarding-house, to escape the attentions of a particularly ardent suitor. Since I had an exam on the Elizabethans the next day, I took my books with me, and a mug of tea, and the three of us holed up in the library, as cosy as you like, reading out lines from_ Antony and Cleopatra _to one another until it closed and we could all go home. I suppose it's awfully gratifying to have a spate of ardent suitors, Marilla, but I think I should lose patience before the end of the week if I had as much to contend with as poor Phil does!_ " 

At which point Marilla, quite unbidden, chuckled aloud. When Rachel looked up at her, in surprise, her eyes were crinkled up at the corners, and she was shaking with mirth.

"Well!" said Rachel. She folded up her spectacles, and put them in her apron pocket. "I hope she passed her exam, after such foolishness. I've always said, these coeducational schools will spell the ruin of many a young woman by the end of the day. You mark my words. This Phillippa Gordon will come to no good, that's what." 

But Marilla didn't answer. Her thin shoulders still shook and she'd turned her head to the side, looking out over the rain-soaked meadow where not a blessed thing was happening that Rachel could make out, when she turned her own head to follow Marilla's gaze. Marilla had her fingers curled up in front of her mouth like she wanted to shelter her laughter from the rest of the room—from Green Gables, or from Avonlea. Rachel remembered the pig and felt, at once, that she didn't know where to look. But after all, there wasn't hardly a thing in the room but the two of them, not accounting Marilla's mending basket and the old hooked rug. So she looked at Marilla's fingers, still curled in front of her mouth: brown and work-roughened and bone-thin like the rest of her. Rachel tried to remember a time she'd ever seen them at rest, before now. 

"That girl," said Marilla, to herself, murmuring into the palm of her hand. "She does beat all." And she chuckled again, in her deep way. So quiet Rachel could hardly make it out.  
  
  
  
  


***

 

 

After that Rachel kept _thinking_ about it. She couldn't seem to stop.

And was it any wonder, she thought, after she'd twisted her ankle in that hazard the Sloanes called a water-catchment? It was a disgrace, that's what, the state they kept it in, and them with all the money you please to hire another man to put it to rights. But that was Sloanishness all over, and if a body was going to pay her neighbourly rounds she had to look mighty sharpish. When put to a choice between bodily peril and dereliction of duty, Lord knew Mrs. Rachel Lynde couldn't be accused of the latter. And so she'd set a foot wrong in the catchment, and twisted her ankle, and had been hobbling about for weeks now, taking twice as long as a person ought to do to get anything done, and getting underfoot into the bargain, until Marilla would park her in her chair in the drawing room, and command her to _set_ a spell, for heaven's sake. Idle hands do the devil's work, it was often said, and so was it any wonder that Rachel's mind had got stuck on the one thing? The pig, and Anne's letter. Anne's letter, and the pig. 

She needed to get out of the house more, that's all. Marilla and the twins were the only souls she'd seen in a week. But it'd be frivolous to bother the hired boy for the trap, and it was mighty difficult to go on foot with her ankle paining her. Every time she so much as stirred to clear the table, Marilla gave her dark looks, and prophesied that at this rate it wouldn't heal before June. Rachel could have told her different—hadn't she gone all the way to White Sands with a twisted ankle in August seven years before, and hadn't she still been right enough to take a turn with Thomas at Vanessa Rutherford's wedding? But anyone could tell you there was no arguing with Marilla Cuthbert's dark looks. And anyway Rachel didn't want to, so much. 

She sighed, and unfolded the newest paper her niece had sent up from Boston. 

This morning she'd got the twins dressed, and chivvied them off to Sunday School with their faces washed and their coin for the collection plate and instructions on how to act and how not to, and then refreshed the linens in her room and in theirs, and then Marilla had caught her wincing coming downstairs, and sat her in the kitchen chair "where I can keep an eye on you," while Marilla kneaded bread dough for supper. She handled it too much; it would dry out; but Rachel didn't say a thing and Marilla didn't either. Rachel opened her paper and supposed she ought to count her blessings, that _some_ people had seen fit to invite her back in the kitchen at all. 

It was warm in here, she'd say that; and the cold outside did get mighty bitter as it got on toward Christmas. Down in Boston they were trying the Robinson woman, Rachel read: the one taken in for poisoning her young son. She read testimony about the exchange of rings between the woman and a married doctor, witnessed by a char-girl—a house with servants! Rachel thought. Nobody must have eyes in their head south of the border. She read about the discovery of arsenic tablets in the mother's possession; about the other young man setting his cap for the mother, too. She must have looks, Rachel thought, since she certainly didn't have character. And her with eight children, some of whom'd be grown if they hadn't been taken. But then Rachel supposed life showed more on honest country folk than pampered city ones. No doubt this Robinson woman wore paint and powder and all manner of nonsense. Rachel stretched her neck back and let the air cool her face, and glanced at Marilla, standing before the window kneading dough. She had that posture, still: that'd been the envy of every girl in Avonlea, forty years since. Long neck; slim waist. Fair enough she'd always been too thin; folks had called her sickly often enough, but Marilla'd not been ill a day in her life that Rachel could remember. And those dresses they'd used to wear at Christmas: those low necks, why they'd be scandalous these days, and no mistake, hanging half-off the girls' shoulders for all to see. It was a wonder they hadn't all caught their deaths. But Marilla was strong, still. Upright. No motion wasted about her, Rachel thought; and tried to remember if there ever had been. 

"If you're sitting there," said Marilla, still facing the window, "you may as well read out."

Rachel startled. Looked down at the paper in her hands. Marilla hadn't the faintest notion of anything that had happened in the Robinson case since October; and Rachel, never having read aloud anything but the Good Book, with which any decent person could be expected to be familiar, wasn't sure how to catch her up about it. But if Marilla wanted to hear what Rachel was reading, then Rachel found herself oddly at pains to see that she should. 

"Arguments of Council," Rachel read, and started in on the defence. His main argument, so far as Rachel could see, was that the murder was an awfully bad one, and that the jury ought to be ashamed of themselves if they reckoned his client would be up to such a thing. " _If the prisoner compassed the death of Willie Robinson_ ," Rachel read, " _she was a bad mother. But I ask you, was she a good mother or not? You might be told that even a bad mother can dissimulate: but can she do it for a lifetime? What event of her life INDICATES ANYTHING BUT TENDERNESS? When they ask you to find that she murdered her son they ask you to find that a good son was murdered by a devoted, loving mother._

"Devoted, my foot," Rachel added. Marilla didn't answer, but she did give the dough an extra strong punch.

" _Then upon the point of the relations between them_ ," Rachel went on, " _we find the son was not only a devoted son, but in addition, we find him coming to manhood when he might begin to repay his mother for her nurture and care._ "

"That's a point," Marilla put in. Rachel turned on her a look of what she could only imagine was indignant surprise. Since Marilla hadn't turned around, she didn't benefit from it. 

"You can't _reason_ with these people, Marilla," Rachel said. "They're sinners and devils. Why, this one had _two_ married suitors. And I don't doubt she did more than encourage them." 

"How much did she get? From the boy's death?"

"Two thousand dollars," said Rachel, nodding emphatically at Marilla's back. "Insurance money."

"That's a sight of money," Marilla admitted. 

She lifted the dough into a pan, and wiped her forehead with her sleeve, then turned to face Rachel, her back to the window. She looked tired, Rachel thought. But soft, somehow. Not as hard as sometimes, at any rate. 

"Why," Rachel told her, "that's more than my Thomas made in two years' time. And who's to say that this William was likely to make anything of himself? Coming from a family like that, he can't have had much to recommend him. And then, who's to say that if he did find steady work, he wouldn't simply use his wages himself? Most young folks do, in this day and age, and I reckon it's even worse in that Boston. Why, Halifax is bad enough! I do hope Anne doesn't hie herself off to any such place."

"I do too, Rachel," Marilla said. 

In the waning wet-grey afternoon light and the heat from the kitchen stove they regarded each other: Rachel settled back in her kitchen chair with her paper in her lap, and Marilla with her sharp shoulders and her granite face and her hands in the pockets of her ancient apron. 

"Well," said Marilla, and turned back to the window. Picked up her knife. "I've got this pork roast to put together. If you wanted to keep on."  
  
  
  
  


***

 

 

Waiting their turn to pay their respects at Josiah Black's funeral Davy fidgeted his starched collar. He scuffed his feet. Rachel cuffed him on the side of the head, and he glared up at her and then went right back to doing it before Rachel'd had time to draw breath. Then she _did_ draw breath, and Marilla, with nothing changing in her face and without taking her eyes off the shuffling of those ahead of them, laid a hand on the back of Davy's neck, and he quieted. Rachel huffed. Surely Marilla could feel Rachel's eyes on the side of her head; but she didn't turn. Just kept that stony, squashed-down look she'd had about her since Anne went back to Redmond. It didn't do to dwell on things so, Rachel thought. She twined her fingers together harder in front of her waist. Mrs. Barry passed by in the other direction, and Rachel nodded to her. She could see Marilla's nod, too, out the corner of her eye. Could feel the stiffness in it, still, after all this time. 

There was nobody to take things to heart like Marilla Cuthbert, Rachel thought. How she got through her days was a mystery, so weighed down by remembered slights. And slights to Anne: good gracious, rifts Anne herself had made up years and years ago still stuck in Marilla's craw. Well: everybody _remembered_ things, of course. Rachel remembered everything that happened between White Sands and and Avonlea for the past forty-five years together, if she did say so herself. It was only the way a body carried the memories. A person couldn't keep all that in themselves. They should give some of it up to Providence, that's what; and anything else would be almost heathenish, if it were possible for Rachel to think of Marilla as anything approaching a heathen. She did hold her sorrows mighty close, though, and no mistake. Only, from time to time—the day with the pig, for instance…

Mr Harrison came toward them from the other direction as they shuffled forward in the queue. Davy shook his head, like a petulant horse fighting the bridle; but Marilla kept her hand on his neck with the same flat line to her mouth. After all, Rachel thought: Anne would be back, during her summer holidays. It wasn't as if it was anything more—anything more permanent. 

But a body did get accustomed to having someone to do for. Rachel knew about that. And having someone young about the place. Anne, whose world always seemed to hold such unaccountable promise. Rachel never had quite got the measure of the girl. 

"Marilla," Davy said, in a near-shout. Rachel pursed her lips.

"Hush," said Marilla. She barely opened her mouth to say it; she still didn't look down. 

"Marilla," said Davy, more quietly. "I tried real hard and waited 'til she was back in her pew, but I want to know. The Timothy Cottons said that Mrs. Barry is mighty grand, on account of her aunt in Halifax is a—a _baronness_."

"Stuff and nonsense," said Marilla, although Anne had been to stay at Josephine Barry's more times than Rachel could count. 

"A robber baron, might be," Rachel said, with a sideways glance, and to her delight Marilla Cuthbert actually _snorted_ before she pulled her face together. After which Marilla said sternly not to dishonour the dead with such talk at a funeral, and she didn't meet Rachel's eye; but Rachel held the memory of that snort to her. Place of God or no.  
  
  
  
  


***

 

 

"All right," Rachel said, from the doorway of the Green Gables kitchen in February with her hands crossed over her chest, as Marilla looked up, brows raised, from rolling out her pie crust. "How do _you_ do it?"

Marilla's snort was an entirely more dubious noise than the one Rachel remembered from White Sands church. But she inched over for Rachel to stand beside her. A wisp of hair had come down out of her bun. It must be tickling her cheek, Rachel thought. Not that a body would guess it to look at Marilla's face. 

"You can cut up the apples," Marilla said. So Rachel took down the knife.  
  
  
  
  


***

 

 

The first time Rachel woke was to pain like fire all up her right side. 

It was so bad it took her a count of minutes and some steadying breaths to work out where it was all coming from. Knee. Hip. Shoulders. Her head hurt. Everything hurt. The shelf, she remembered. The shelf with the milk pails. Grabbing hold of it for balance and feeling the nails rip from the wood. Her back. The smack of the stairs to the back of her head. She groaned. Turned over and slept. 

When she woke again it was to the creak of door-hinges and the spectre of Marilla, clutching sternly a bowl of soup. The line between her eyes looked harsher, Rachel thought, than it had used to do. There was a near sight no black left now, in her hair. 

"You're awake," said Marilla. 

Rachel couldn't deny it. 

"You gave us quite a turn," Marilla said. 

"Ham and bean?" Rachel asked. Cleared her throat. Tried to sit herself up. She was in her old winter night-dress Thomas had bought her that Christmas in White Sands. Someone'd undone her stays. Done Heaven knew what with her Sunday skirts. 

"Beef," Marilla told her. "Carrots and potatoes." 

Soup on the bureau and Marilla smoothed down her apron with her hands. That same old apron, Rachel thought, blinking the grit out of her eyes. It'd used to be brown. Lord, but Rachel's back hurt something awful. 

Marilla reached over her with a grunt; pulled out the second pillow from where Rachel'd pushed it between the wall and the mattress in her sleep. She fluffed it and buffeted it all which ways, but with all of six feathers floating around in a cotton slip a body could only do so much. The exasperation of watching such a thing, and not being able to reach out and snatch it from her. 

Rachel said, "I've got a yard and a half quilting cotton in my trunk that's a dead match for the patch on that apron." 

Marilla grunted.

"Let me make you up a new one," Rachel pressed. "That old thing's about to fall to rags, and no mistake."

Marilla stopped battering the pillow and put it back on the bed. She held out her arms to go under Rachel's arms and Rachel allowed herself to be shifted more upright in bed. For the ancient pillow to be stuffed behind her back. Marilla smelled like the stew, and perspiration, and the mud cellar where Rachel had fallen. And like the rain. The damp of an island March. 

"Come now," Marilla said, close to Rachel's ear. Rachel closed her eyes. She felt Marilla draw back for the soup. 

"Let's get some colour back into your face," said Marilla. "I've made Dr. Blair give me something I can give you for the pain—"

"Don't be ridiculous."

"—but you can't take it unless you eat."

Rachel stared. No Cuthbert would ever. Rachel wouldn't either, for that matter. Sickness was something else, but for a few bruises—! Why, Pauline Harris said Bertha Macallister had got up to three bottles a week by the time she went. It was a weakness of character and a failing before God, that's what, and if Rachel hurt from knees to nose then that was the will of Providence, and she would bear it gladly. Marilla must have taken leave of her senses. Still, the stew smelled mighty tempting. 

"You'll let me make you up a new apron," Rachel said. 

"Oh, for heaven's sake," Marilla said, eyes to Heaven. Rachel grunted, and lifted the spoon. 

The stew was the same old beef stew they'd had at Green Gables all winter. But it warmed her. Tip to toes. And Marilla, once she'd seen Rachel was eating, seemed to breathe easier. She even sat on the edge of Rachel's bed while Rachel ate, looking out at the little spare room with that yardstick-straight posture. She put a hand to the back of her neck. 

"That shelf was a menace," Rachel said, between bites. 

"Been meaning to take it down for ages," Marilla said. "I'm just sorry you had to find it out like that. Dr. Blair says nothing broken, but I still—I'm sorry you had to find it out like that."

Rachel watched the soup disappear in her bowl and Marilla, and Marilla watched nothing happen in the middle of the room. Against the pane of the window next to the bed, a soft rain beat down. The drops chased each other down the glass. Stopped and started. Collected and joined and raced on.

"Draughty up here," Marilla said, and Rachel looked over.

"No more than anyplace," she said. 

"I never used to—" Marilla said, and stopped. Her mouth worked. Tightened. She said, "Seems I feel it more, these days." 

Rachel chewed. Swallowed. 

"Well!" she said. "It's scarcely a wonder, is it! Not an ounce of fat on you, that's what. You were always skinny as a rake; I never held with it. I'd have said it couldn't be healthy, but aside from those headaches I can't think you've been sick a day in your life, however much you're skin and bones; and here's me, laid up for the second time in a year. Still! I'd like to see the shape you'd be in, if you'd taken a fall like the one I took." 

Marilla turned and met her eyes, at that speech. Another person, Rachel thought, would have missed the curve of her mouth. The way her shoulders sat easier on her back.

"And you, Rachel," Marilla said, pushing to her feet, "will put us all in our graves."

She took the soup bowl from Rachel, and cocked an eyebrow at her before she turned to go back downstairs. The bowl had still had a bit of warmth to it. Rachel found herself missing it, as her hands cooled.  
  
  
  
  


***

 

 

It was near April by the time Rachel was well enough to limp around downstairs with nobody to lean on. By that time she was well and truly scandalised by how behind she'd become on the goings-on in town, and toward the end of her time in bed had even—against her better judgment—allowed Davy to stampede into her sick room and regale her with highly-coloured tales of their neighbours' doings. Half was exaggeration and the other half misheard or misunderstood, but Rachel got some satisfaction, after the boy left, from sitting in bed and separating out, in her mind, the wheat from the chaff. And when she'd got the right end up and thought back on the story he'd told her, then Marilla would come up with her dinner and Rachel would tell her both versions, and once or twice Marilla had laughed so hard the tears had run down her cheeks. Once she'd been taken by surprise with it and fairly shrieked with laughter, and Rachel had felt so warm she might have thrown off every quilt piled on her lap. So warm it might have been midsummer. 

By Easter Rachel was able to hobble from the Green Gables parlour to the carriage, and from the carriage to the church; and she was rewarded with a long chat with Pauline Harris and another with Mrs. Sloane, and since Josephine Barry had come to see the new baby, and the minister couldn't very well make a digression from the Good Book on the day of the Saviour's Resurrection, Rachel felt a new woman by the time they made their way home to Green Gables—though an hour after luncheon she was sound asleep by the fire. Marilla roused her and sent her back up to her sick room. Rachel lay in her spare room bed, sinking toward sleep, thinking about Mrs. Sloane, and the service, and the way Marilla's hand on her shoulder when she'd wakened her had been neither rough nor too gentle—as if Rachel were again sturdy enough not to collapse into sickliness at a touch. She smiled into the thin pillows, and closed her eyes. 

The day after, she was creaky in body, but so buoyed up by the outing of the day before that she was up before the sun, and before day had truly broken on the Green Gables field she was down in the kitchen, helping Marilla with the bread and the coffee. Then, as it was a fine April morning and Marilla was dead set on spring cleaning; and as Rachel could walk well enough now even if bending down was still beyond her, she carted quilts and carpets and sheets and throws out into the field and hung them on the lines while Marilla, on hands and knees, scoured the window-ledges and wainscoting and the floors, and put new moth balls in all the trunks. Rachel helped her to move the beds and they swept out under them, and after that Rachel's hip was paining her again and though she didn't mention it Marilla, who plain as day was still full of vim and vinegar and had hours of daylight left, said she'd been wanting to clean the oven, and once back in the kitchen herded Rachel into her kitchen chair. "To get you out of my hair," Marilla said. But she added: "This came for you, from Boston," and handed Rachel a parcel with a look around her eyes that was as good as an invitation. 

So Marilla applied herself to soap and steel wool, and Rachel handed her rags when she asked and read to her about the doings in the States. They'd let the Robinson woman go, Rachel informed Marilla. That was back in December, and now they had her up on more murders. 

"I'm sure it's beyond me how they could've let her off in the first place," Rachel said. "And this time she's done in her own sister, and the poor woman's husband into the bargain. Well! This is what comes of unchecked Godlessness, that's what. Sloth and covetousness, and a lack of stewardship toward our fellow men. Why, this Mrs. Robinson scarce took pains to hide what she was about. Bold as brass: it says here she said to a neighbour that _Freeman was a worthless fellow and that she wouldn't have had him come to live with her but for the insurance, and she said she 'wished somebody would give him a dose and get him out of the way.'_ Well! I suppose life in Boston is so far gone that a body takes such talk in stride."

Marilla grunted. She held out her hand for another rag, and Rachel handed her one down. The back of Marilla's work blouse stuck to her spine, and the tendrils of hair that had escaped from her bun were stuck to the back of her neck. Her shoulders looked so thin, moving beneath the cotton. The way she favoured her left knee. 

"Go on," Marilla said. Rachel let her breath out in a huff.

"Well!" she said. "It says here, _Freeman was taken sick_ —that's the sister's widower, mind— _and Mrs. Robinson told him that he must go over to Charlestown and see his mother and say good-by to her, because he was going to die._ I mean to say! The boldness of her! _Mr. Freeman went over to South Boston and was taken sick on his way to work, vomiting, etc. He was obliged to go home. Mrs. Robinson was expecting him to come home sick._ No surprise there. _She said so to several witnesses. She sent him to bed and sent for a doctor, and immediately commenced to tell everybody THAT HE WAS GOING TO DIE_ —that last's in large print, capitals— _and would never get out of his bed. The reason was that she claimed that she had received a communication to that effect from the spirit world._ " 

Rachel gestured with the newspaper, though Marilla still had her head in the oven and was scrubbing mightily. 

"It's Godless nonsense, all this talk of ghosts and spirits and the dead coming back with messages for the living. Folks getting greedy, that's what. Trusting to Providence isn't enough for them, I dare say. Knowing they'll see their dead again in the world to come not satisfying enough. Young people these days want to hurry things along."

Marilla withdrew her head from the oven for just long enough to give Rachel an exasperated look. Her eyes so dark in the fading light. A smudge of grease across her cheek. 

"It's a weakness of character, mark my words," said Rachel, and Marilla shook her head and dove back into the oven. "And there'll always be the likes of this Mrs. Robinson to feed on it. Just listen: _She seems to have been haunted._ This is the prosecutor speaking, now. _She was all the time receiving messages from spirits. One person said to her: 'Why, Mrs. Robinson, what have you been doing to all these people who have died that they come back to you,' and Mrs. Robinson was prostrated and fell down fainting._ Well, I do declare. That's just play-acting, plain and simple. No different from an actress in a traveling show, except that everyone knows that's a lie, whereas this Mrs. Robinson passed her falsehoods off as the truth. And why else would folks keep agreeing to move into her house? Why else would no one question how she knew all these people were dying? It's rank superstition, that's what, and those high-falutin' Boston people need some plain common sense talked to them. Any fool could see, if everybody around a person dies in the same way and she collects the life insurance, don't move house to hers and take out a policy! The Good Lord helps those who help themselves, that's what I always say, and if the—"

A sudden noise came from inside the oven. Marilla straightened up too quick, and her head hit the rim of the oven so that by the time she sat back on her heels, she was rubbing the back of it. Her hair was coming down around her face and her hands and neck were smeared with oven grease. Her face showed nothing but pain and consternation, and Rachel, looking at it, felt a sudden sharp sense of having been cheated. 

"Next time," Marilla said, looking up at her from the floor as she rubbed her head, "they'll have to ask _you_ , Rachel, whether their kinswoman is likely to murder them in their beds."

Rachel opened her mouth to say—she didn't know what. But Marilla's eyes were crinkling up at the corners, and her mouth—she was _pressing_ it straight. Rachel was sure. If Marilla were alone she would be smiling. But if she were alone, thought Rachel, there would be no cause for amusement in the first place. 

"Yes," Rachel said. Sniffed, and shook out the paper. "They'd be better off now if they had, and no mistake."  
  
  
  
  


***

 

 

"I d'no," Davy told her, again.

"Don't know," Marilla corrected. Rachel harrumphed.

"You _ought_ to know," she told Davy. "You ought to take note of such things as who else is present, when a friend invites you to stay the night."

Marilla spooned out more potatoes. Davy looked mulish.

"What will you do if you go to town and meet with one of the other boys who was there?" Rachel pressed. "And you don't know his name?"

"Well—I'll ask him, won't I?" 

"And suppose you meet his father, and this boy has told his father all about you, and what a fine fellow you are. You'll feel mighty foolish if this man knows all about you, and you don't know a blessed thing about him or his boy."

"No I won't!" Davy said. "I _won't_ feel foolish, I—" 

"Eat your meat," said Marilla, over him, and something in her voice made Rachel look over. Marilla was looking at her own water glass with a tautness around her eyes and her lips pressed together. Rachel looked at her a long few seconds. The pig, and Anne's letter. Marilla never met her eyes.

"Suppose this fellow's father was planning another outing," Rachel said, turning back to Davy, "for the boys his son had met at the lake. Do you suppose he'll still feel like inviting you, after you plumb forgot his boy? He will not! He'll think you weren't raised right. Like you aren't the right kind of boy for his son to be associating with." She snuck a glance at Marilla, whose gaze was still fixed on her glass of water. "He'll think you don't have the proper respect, that's what, and Lord knows he won't be far wrong."

"It don't sound like his son'd be much fun," said Davy, and Marilla cleared her throat and said "Doesn't."

"I reckon you'd be singing a different tune if the father in question was Mr. Lockwood, and all the other boys got to go fishing of a Saturday in that nice big pond he's got. Or if it happened your new friend was Mr Harris's boy, and all the time he might've had an after-school job in the store for a bright boy like you, if only you'd known to ask. Or if you—"

"Anyway we didn't talk about our fathers," Davy mumbled, around his meat. 

"Land sakes, child!" Rachel said. She let herself splutter. Let herself throw up her hands. "What if you were sleeping next to a heathen? Or a Methodist?"

"Excuse me," said Marilla, and stood up so fast her chair scraped on the wood. She left the room; Rachel heard the pantry door. Her heart was going fit to beat the band. Davy was sitting looking after her in his frankly curious way, and Dora was perched in her chair primly pretending to have noticed nothing. 

"I'm not finished with you yet," she told the boy, rising from the table. Her throat felt oddly fluttery, but her voice was steady. "I'd best see what's ailing Marilla, but I'll be back directly. Sit there, mind," she said, "and finish your potatoes." He would run and hide as soon as she was out of sight. The attic, or the space behind the stairs. As usual there was nothing to be done about Dora. She'd sit there as long as she was left. 

Rachel always bustled everywhere, so there was nothing unusual in hurrying to the pantry. She lit a candle and pulled the door open. Marilla was still there, doubled over by the preserved pears, shaking, silent, tears of laughter on her face. On the peg next to her hung the new brown apron Rachel'd sewn up from the yardage in her trunk. A kind of a russet colour. It would bring out her eyes, Rachel had thought, times and times, watching the thread trace its way through two layers of fabric; through three; through four.

Marilla startled when she heard the door, but when she saw it was Rachel she just shook her head, eyes to Heaven, and kept on. She let Rachel see. Didn't try to hide. It warmed Rachel bones to skin and filled her. She stepped into the pantry and pushed the bolt to and put her candle down by the pears with her hands on Marilla's waist and leaned into her. Felt her wet laughing face with her own face. Marilla shook her head again but her hands came up, exasperated, to hold Rachel's face. To shake it, a little. To curl her shoulders down and press her dry lips to Rachel's lips, hard, awkward and stuffy and still laughing, locked together in the pantry with their fronts pressed together and their sides digging into shelves of jelly jars and last year's bottles of currant wine. 

"You know the boy can tell as well as I can you just can't bear living with your curiosity unsatisfied," Marilla said. She rested her forehead against Rachel's. "You're fishing in your own interests."

"And yours," Rachel said. Out of breath, a little. 

Marilla snorted. She straightened up, and sighed the last bits of laughter away; picked up Rachel's candle and let go of Rachel's hand.

**Author's Note:**

> The _Dragnet_ -style run-down on Mrs Lynde's niece's Boston papers: Sarah Robinson, otherwise known as "the Massachusetts Borgia," was eventually convicted of eight murders by arsenic poisoning, of which her son William's was the last. Her other victims, in order of their deaths, were: her landlord, her husband, her sister, her brother-in-law, her niece and nephew, and her daughter. All except the first were motivated by insurance fraud. Robinson was tried twice: once in December 1887 for William's death only, at which the prosecution was hamstrung by not being able to mention the truly alarming number of other suspicious poisonings surrounding the accused (this trial resulted in a hung jury); and again in February 1888, at a more comprehensive trial which found her guilty of murder in the first degree. She was sentenced to hang, but the sentence was commuted to life in solitary confinement. You can read more about her well-nigh unbelievable string of crimes [here](http://www.murderbygaslight.com/2013/03/the-massachusetts-borgia.html). 
> 
> Newspaper excerpts from Robinson's arrest, and her first and second trials, are courtesy of the _Boston Daily Globe_ from Tuesday, August 2, 1887; Saturday, December 17, 1887; and Tuesday, February 7, 1888. I was working under the assumption that Mrs Lynde's niece only sends the _Globe_ along after she's finished with it, and that it takes an erratic but sometimes considerable amount of time for them to reach PEI through the mail, so that Rachel and Marilla are getting around to a paper from early February in early April. 
> 
> Relatedly, I confused myself trying to research the exact chronology of the Anne books, but the consensus seems to be that their internal logic doesn't totally make sense. Based on Anne's being 27 during the election of 1896, having her first year at Redmond from 1887-1888 should be about right, even though it seems very early to me based on her sons going off to fight in WWI at tender ages. But OH WELL, if it didn't bother Lucy Maud then it doesn't bother me. \o? 
> 
> (Also, I moved Mrs Lynde's fall down the stairs earlier in the chronology, because artistic license.)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[PODFIC] Anything but tenderness by breathedout](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8805946) by [joyinrepetition](https://archiveofourown.org/users/joyinrepetition/pseuds/joyinrepetition)




End file.
